The story behind IMMAGE
IMMAGE is at the start of its 10-year journey. So far, all offshore and onshore drilling sites have been selected and screened for safety, and the offshore drilling cruise Exp 401 took place from Dec 2023 - Feb 2024.
IMMAGE's Story
IMMAGE was born out of two previous international research initiatives:
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MEDGATE (2012-2016), an EU-funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network that reconstructed Mediterranean-Atlantic gateway exchange before, during and after the Messinian Salinity Crisis by integrating analytical data from outcrops either side of the Gibraltar Strait with seismic data and numerical modelling;.IODP
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Expedition 339 (2011-2012) which recovered Pliocene and Pleistocene contourites around the Iberian margin in the Atlantic to evaluate the environmental significance of the Mediterranean Outflow Water and its global implications.
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Funding
MagellanPlus Funded Workshop, Rabat 2015
The synergy between these two projects resulted in a RCMNS-MEDGATE colloquium with an embedded MagellanPlus-funded workshop, held in in Rabat (Morocco) in 2015 . During the meeting, a new set of questions emerged about the role of the Late Miocene Mediterranean overflow water in driving climate and the mixing processes associated with ultra-high density brines like those generated during evaporite precipitation. These questions cannot be answered with the existing onshore and offshore datasets, nor are the current numerical representations of overflows in climate models sufficient to address them. The crucial knowledge gap is a complete sedimentary record, both of the Late Miocene Mediterranean overflow, preserved along the Iberian margin in the Atlantic, and the three Miocene Mediterranean-Atlantic gateway connections. Today, only one of these gateways (i.e., the Gibraltar-Alborán system) is still functioning. The other two marine corridors, closed during the Late Miocene; their records are preserved onshore in Spain and Morocco. The outcome of the MagellanPlus workshop was a recognition that what we needed was a Land-2-Sea drilling project. An ICDP-funded workshop about 18-months later, again in Morocco, allowed us to craft the scientific objectives that underpin IMMAGE and start the process of identifying possible drilling sites. We submitted the full proposal to IODP and ICDP in 2018.
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ICDP Funded Workshop, Rabat 2016
We received early approval from ICDP with an award of $1.5 million towards the onshore drilling costs (around a third of the total required at the time), subject to IMMAGE also being approved by IODP. The IODP evaluation and safety screening process took much longer, in part because several of our original offshore sites were problematic. We finally received the news that the offshore element of IMMAGE had been scheduled as IODP Exp-401, in the summer of 2022. The expedition is timetabled to run from 10th December 2023 to 9th February 2024, making it the antepenultimate IODP cruise aboard the Joides Resolution, at its last Christmas Expedition.
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Integrated Land-2-Sea science also requires the science parties for each drilling expedition to be integrated. With a view to kickstarting the ten-year scientific collaboration necessary to underpin this, we ran a pre-drilling workshop in Bristol in July for the Exp-401 shipboard party and IMMAGE proponents. As well as getting to know each other, we used this opportunity, to work out how IMMAGE will function over the short and longer-term, its decision-making framework and funding strategy. This is particularly critical for Land-2-Sea projects as the funding framework for ICDP does not provide all the resources that are required for the onshore drilling. As a result of this and the scale of the project as a whole, we anticipate that the drilling and science associated with IMMAGE will take around a decade to deliver.
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IMMAGE Land-2-Sea pre-drilling workshop, Bristol 2023
